Hallowed Ground: The Gothic New England of Sarah Orne Jewett and Mary Wilkins Freeman

Abstract

Against a dominant diminished view of rural New England in the late nineteenth century, Mrozowski argues that Sarah Orne Jewett and Mary Wilkins Freeman deployed a Gothic regionalist aesthetic that balanced paltry economic prospects and winnowed worldviews with haunting, excessive descriptions of the landscape that bordered on the mystical and the sacred. Jewett’s Country-By Ways (1881) and Freeman’s Six-Trees (1903) exemplify a Gothic vision compensating for the lost agencies and eroded powers of New England inhabitants. Through lush portraits of stoic trees, ruined farms and unmarked graves, these writers celebrated a local world far richer than some austere Calvinism, more grounded than the new age mysticism of spiritualism and theosophy, and more recalcitrant than the grasping impulses of Gilded age capitalism.